(Disclosure – AVG is a Rabbit client and we developed this campaign for them.   However, the subject matter – what sort of digital footprints we’re creating for our children – is one that I do think deserves more thought and discussion)

What’s the average age at which a child starts acquiring an online footprint?  In North America, Australia and Europe you’ll be “born” online at an average of six months old and by two 80%+ of children will have a presence on the Web.

That’s according to Internet Security company AVG, which carried out research among mothers in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the ‘EU5′ (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain).

Not only that, 23% of children will have had their scans uploaded online – meaning in a sense that their online life will pre-date their real one.   And that online footprint will be built on and will follow them around for the rest of their lives.

Other research highlights:

• In the US 92% of children under two have an online presence, compared to 73% in the EU5.   In Japan however it’s only 43%
• Though the average digital birth of children happens at around six months, a third (33%) of children have information and photos online within weeks of being born. In the UK, 37% of newborns have an online life from birth, whereas in Australia and New Zealand the figure is 41%.
• A quarter (23%) of children have had their pre-birth scans uploaded to the Internet. This figure is higher in the US, where 34% have had antenatal scans posted online, while in Canada the figure is even higher at 37%
• Seven percent of babies and toddlers have an email address created for them by their parents and five percent have a social network profile

Why does all this matter?

Well, privacy concerns aside (a five minute scan through Open Facebook and you can find plenty of baby and pregnancy information), parents are creating what’s called been called a ‘digital dossier’ for another human being.

As AVG’s research showed, many kids today will be ‘present’ online right from the moment of their birth and it’s worth thinking about what kind of information you want to make available about your child online.

And on the note of creating digital dossiers, this short film produced by the (Harvard) Berkman Center for Internet & Society following the online path of a (fictional) child called Andy is worth looking at:

(See also the blog post by AVG CEO JR Smith on the subject)

Canadian research firm Sysomos has come out with some interesting, if not that surprising, research about Twitter A-listers and their followers.

That research can be summed up like this:  Celebs might have hundreds of thousands or even 1+ million followers, but that’s very often made up of people who specifically joined Twitter to follow said celeb and have done nothing since.  Hence they are not engaged on Twitter and may in fact be part of the 83% who according to RJ Metrics don’t log into their accounts every month.

That also ties into the recent research that 50% of under 35s re influenced by friends. on social media, but only 17% by celebs

By contrast, people who follow the so-called social media “gurus” are engaged and influential in their own right.   And in the middle, we have people who follow media Twitter accounts.   They are Twitter consumers.  And while they don’t live and breath it, neither have they just checked in to see Ashton Kutcher and checked out again.

The following three tables pretty much say it all:

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• Judging a Twitter User by Their Followers (Sysomos) (techmeme.com)
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• People in their 20s and 30s and in the US most likely to blog (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• On Twitter, It’s Just Five Degrees of Separation (readwriteweb.com)

Most agencies, ourselves included, urge clients to claim their brand IDs on social networks.    Here’s how not to do it.

Ad Agency Carat (via @thefounder), wanted to take back the Facebook URL for Harman International (the speakers and headphones people).

The only problem was, it had already been registered by someone…genuinely called ‘Harman’ (Harman Bajwa based in Vancouver, Canada).

The agency promptly contacted Harman Bajwa to inform him that they were “working with Facebook to reclaim the username”, but that they’d be happy to take it off his hands in exchange for ‘product.’   So, what – some free speakers?    Apparently Carat had tried this in the past with the person who owned twitter.com/avtr (when they were promoting the film Avatar) and it worked.

Harman declined the free speaker offer.    Facebook then got involved, telling him he was in violation of their policies, “which should have a clear connection to one’s identity.”   Like someone’s name?   Apparently not, the brand claim was stronger.

Following a bit of negative publicity helped along by a Support Harman group on Facebook itself, Facebook relented.   The result is a bit of egg on faces all around for Facebook, Harman International and Carat and a lesson to all of us, that should hopefully be pretty obvious.

There are plenty of examples of social media brandjacking by the malicious, mischievous or opportunistic.   There are also plenty of cases of simple coincidence where someone also has a legitimate claim, in which case it’s worth treading carefully.  Rather than trying to palm them off with a few freebies, before resorting to threats.

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• Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International (techcrunch.com)

A Harris Research / AdWeek poll (via Marketing Charts) in the US puts some data onto a growing trend – the graying print newspaper market.

Among all Americans 43% still read a paper every day, a figure that is higher than I thought it would be.

However once you break it down into age groups a different picture emerges.   Among the over 55s, 2/3 still read their morning (or afternoon) paper.   For 35-44 year olds that’s down to just over a third (36%) while for 18-34 year olds it’s not even a quarter (23%).

I tried to find similar stats for the UK, and even two years ago according to a Parliamentary committee, 45% (so less than half) of the UK population read one of the national papers every day, with readership among 25-34 year olds falling by more compared to 18-24 year olds (40% to 37%).  Meanwhile the decline among the over 65s was only 3%.

In other words both the US and UK stats show that among seniors the daily paper is a habit.   The question obviously is, will it die out with them?

On the RAAK blog, Wessel van Rensburg has put the long term decline of the UK newspaper market into perspective.  In 1951, 48 million people lived in the UK while today there are 60+ million, an increase of 25%.   Yet, even while the population has increased, newspaper circulations have gone down by 30%.

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• How long can print newspapers last? (newsosaur.blogspot.com)
• Elderly Take Over! (stephenkinsella.net)
• Poll: Most won’t pay to read newspapers online (news.cnet.com)

On the back of its June Twitter research, which looked into the geographic spread of the Twitter population, research firm Sysomos has produced an update.   The new Sysomos report has non-US users inching towards 50% of the total, and shows that the network as a whole is a lot less anglophone today than it was in June.

US users now account for 50.88% of the total, down from 62.1%.   The UK’s share has remained more or less constant on 7.2%, but it’s been overtaken by Brazil, which has the second highest Twitter population at 8.79% as a whole.

Bear in mind that Brazil’s Internet penetration is around 35-40% with 32 million users, while the UK’s is 76% with 37 million users.   As a result, when looking at it in these terms, Brazil scores even higher (anyone know why Twitter is, relatively speaking, so popular there?).

When it comes to the total number of tweets, as opposed to users, a slightly different picture emerges.   This gives an indication as to where the most active twitter population is.   Here, the US is still comfortably in front with 56.59% of messages, the UK is second with 8.09% and Brazil is 3rd with 6.73%.

What does all this mean for marketers?   Several months ago when advising a European client I called Twitter an overwhelmingly English speaking network that (in Europe) does much better in the UK than elsewhere.    That holds true today, though it’s certainly less true than it was then.

Six months ago the US + UK + Canada + Australia accounted for 78.5% of the total Twitter population – almost eight in ten.   Today that figure is 64.82% – less than two thirds.

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